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  This genital surgery leads us neatly into the second element of Eliade’s ordeal—mutilation. The main function of bodily mutilation appears to be not just extreme pain, but also permanent advertisement of the initiate’s endurance and membership in the initiated group. One of many modern examples is the hot-iron branding used by some African American college fraternity males to advertise their solidarity.17 A more extreme one is the severing of finger segments, used as both a punishment and initiation ritual, among the Japanese boryokudan, known to Westerners as the yakuza.

  Another ritual of the boryokudan, incidentally, confirms a curious fact, alluded to by the Sambian initiations: that male mutilatory rituals frequently center on the penis. Twenty percent of incarcerated Japanese boryokudan examined in a survey by the Kumamoto University Department of Legal Medicine, for example, were found to carry a peculiar genital modification: penile balls. This mutilatory ritual, called pearling, sounds excruciating—the subject, or a fellow prisoner, penetrates the foreskin with a sharpened toothpick or paperclip, gouges out a tunnel, then pushes a “pearl” of glass or melted plastic deep into the wound, leaving it there to heal in situ. Yet even this gruesome procedure is a cakewalk compared to the savage penile modifications endured by men in prehistoric times.

  Modern circumcision, for example, is often denounced as a barbaric and primitive practice, even generating its own protest group: the International Organisation Against Circumcision Trauma (INTACT). Modern medical circumcisions of adult males, however, are performed under anaesthetic—usually a dorsal penile nerve block—in a ten-minute, low-invasive surgical procedure. Tribal circumcisions, however, often were, and are, excruciatingly long operations performed with no pain relief—this was, in fact, their point. The Keyo circumcision ritual, for example, was not only the culmination of the abusive ceremonies already described, it also required the initiates to stand stock-still while boiyot-ab-tuum (the “old-man-of-the-rite”) skinned their penis from halfway down its shaft using the kibos (“bald-headed knife”), then sliced off any remaining skin and connective tissue with a razor blade;18 finally, the remnant penile skin was yanked forward, a transverse cut made, and the bloodied shaft forced through to make it sit up permanently in semi-erect mode. Incredibly, very few young Keyo males failed this ordeal, though apparently death from blood loss and gangrene were common. Even Keyo circumcision, however, pales beside the sub-incision rite practiced by Australian Aboriginal men throughout the continent’s desert regions. In this rite, still practiced, the underside of the young man’s penis is slit deeply from tip to scrotum (depending on how much pain the initiate can bear) using either an extremely sharp, traditional quartz knife or (these days) a razor blade. The penis then heals open, urethra exposed, leaving it looking something like a pitcher plant flower. How clearly this is a means of permanently advertising status can be seen in the custom of some South Australian tribal men who, on meeting the men of a strange tribe, would press their penises into the palm of each stranger to demonstrate their initiated status.19

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  A medal, or a chest to pin it on?

  The large number of military medals handed out these days seems to give comfort that modern male bravery is alive and well. Only, however, if we assume one not-quite-indisputable fact: that every soldier who gets a medal deserves it.

  Some critics point out that, in the United States at least, military decorations show unmistakeable signs of inflation—the tendency to grow until just about everyone gets one. In some cases this is literally true: every U.S. soldier who fought in the first Gulf War got a medal just for showing up, and more medals were handed out for the invasion of Grenada than troops who actually participated.20 It is also now the case that every U.S. soldier who completes boot camp gets a medal for doing so. Even the most revered decorations have not proven uninflatable—one U.S. paratrooper in the 1989 invasion of Panama received a Purple Heart for getting heat stroke.

  Interestingly, medals awarded for ultra-heroic bravery—like the Victoria Cross and the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor—have bucked the trend, going down rather than up. The United Kingdom, for example, has awarded just 14 Victoria Crosses since World War II, compared to 1,340 in the 90 years before that. The United States, similarly, has given out just 7 Congressional Medals of Honor (the highest military bravery award) since the Vietnam War, compared to 245 in that conflict. Similarly, 20,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War won Silver Stars (the third-highest award), while just 400 have in the years since.21 The pattern is so striking that the economists who authored the paper revealing it asked, quite justifiably, “Where have all the heroes gone?”

  To be fair, heroism is definitely harder for the modern soldier than his World War II comrade. Charge an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) in Iraq, yelling like a banshee, and chances are you’ll wind up dead before onlookers even have a chance to download the Medal of Honor application form. It’s also true that military brass have become deliberately miserly with these awards, partly as a reaction against the free-for-all with lesser medals. Yet the paper’s authors point out that the main cause is a far less noble one. Rising incomes and affluence have vastly increased the “opportunity cost” of dying through heroism. Put simply, modern soldiers have much more to live for than soldiers of their fathers’ generation, and so take the rational, sensible, and completely cowardly decision to make sure they stick around to enjoy it.

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  Though also a simple cosmetic option for both men and women these days, tattooing remains another body-altering ordeal often used to assert masculine identity. A survey of American military men with tattoos, for example, showed that they considered theirs to both promote in-group solidarity (“all Marines have tattoos”) and advertise the wearer’s ability to suffer the ordeal of getting them (“they !@#$% hurt!”).22 Ancient tattooees, however, would have laughed at such pretensions. New Zealand Maori full-face moko tattoos, for example, were hammered into the tattooee’s skin using bone and stone chisels (which also featured special spatulas to wipe away the copious blood flow) leaving deep, permanent furrows. The process was so painful that several attendants were required to hold the recipient down, and it often left the tattooee so injured that he had to be hand-fed through a funnel for weeks. Traditional Samoan tataus were even more brutal, utilizing inking combs of sharpened human bone that were bashed into the skin with a heavy coconut-palm mallet. Since their main purpose was to demonstrate the bravery of their wearers, they often featured plain areas of solid color from navel to knee as part of their intricate designs, leading early explorers to report that Samoan men wore strange, tight silk breeches. Given that these breeches involved weeks of painful pounding and piercing of the anus, scrotum, penis, and perineum, and the very real threat of death through infection, we can readily acknowledge their wearers were extremely brave. Even the boryokudan—whose association with traditional irezumi tattoos is so marked that many Japanese swimming pools expressly forbid tattooed swimmers so as to keep gangsters out—are wusses in comparison to their painted predecessors. Modern-day yakuza get their full-body irezumi done in Western-style parlors using high-speed inking machines and Western inks. Traditional irezumi, however, were hand-pricked into the boryokudan gangster’s body with iron needles over a period of years by a horishi (tattoo master). The cadmium-based inks used by the horishi apparently caused such extreme pain that even the most stoic of early yakuza could only bear an inch or two of coloring in one session.

  Eliade’s third element of initiatory ordeals, the performance of physical feats, is often still part of modern male rituals, too. Mike Carlie describes the “blood-in, blood-out” rule by which prospective American gang members must commit a murder, or other act of violence, to gain entry to the gang (they also, as the name implies, must commit one to get out). This sounds ferocious, yet in the age of firearms such feats are often tame, drive-by affairs posing little risk to the shooter (Carlie reports that even just shooting up an enemy gangbanger’s house-front w
as often acceptable). Some Papuan tribesmen of the New Guinea highlands in the colonial era, by contrast, could not even marry until they had committed their first murder—by hand, with a ceremonial bone dagger—after which they wore a special homicidal insignia that marked them as initiated killers for the rest of their lives.23 Numerous other tribes and societies historically had even more dangerous initiation tests in which young males had to single-handedly kill savage beasts. Alexander the Great, to quote a famous example, was not allowed a spot on the couch at the Macedonian royal court’s regular drinking symposium until he had speared a wild boar (Sus scrofa, specimens of which reach 550 pounds and can disembowel a man with their ten-inch tusks) without the help of a net. East African Maasai boys initiated into the murran warrior class faced even greater perils. During the olamayio ritual (in fact not solely an initiation rite) they often killed, by hand, full-grown lions. Remarkably, these ritual hunts still take place, and still using spears, though the Maasai have presumably had access to guns for decades now.

  If modern male initiation rituals are a shadow of the tortures endured by ancestral males, what about actual torture? How well would modern men withstand the terrifying, grievous mistreatment that males historically endured, either from tribal enemies or cruel overlords? Most of us seem to believe that the new millennium has ushered in a depraved, brave new world of fiendishly refined torture, along with ever more scientifically advanced methods of resisting it. In 2005–06, for example, a scandal erupted in the United States when it emerged that psychologists from the military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) program, which trains U.S. soldiers to resist torture in the event of capture, had played a role in the creation of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on detainees at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to critics, the sleep deprivation, hypothermia-inducing cold, waterboarding, and stress positions constituted a barbaric new development in the sordid history of torture, though an intriguing rock engraving on the walls of the Addaura Cave in Sicily, dated to approximately 10,000 BCE., clearly shows two men who may be captured warriors bound in a classic stress position, with legs and neck tied together to forcibly arch their backs.24 The SERE-program schools (there are six, distributed between the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force) also boast that graduates of their grueling program of confinement, deprivation, and abuse are better prepared than any other soldiers in history to withstand ill-treatment at the hands of an enemy. Yet, without taking anything away from the suffering of modern POWs, how tough are SERE graduates really?

  How, for example, might they fare in comparison to Native American men in pre-contact North America? Native American warriors had a reputation for showing extreme bravery in the face of torture; they had to, since they were also some of the premier torturers of the hunter-gatherer world. (This is sometimes disputed: scalping, for instance, is frequently described as a European import rather than an indigenous Native American practice. A 1980 investigation by William Sturtevant, curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian Institute, however, pointed out that the evidence of a Native American origin of scalping is overwhelming—many pre-contact Native American skulls bear scalping cut marks, and the word itself was not even a verb in English until white settlers saw the practice in America.25) Scalping was not simply a painless procedure inflicted solely on dead enemies. Records show that it was also a torture technique. Jesuit missionaries in the Great Lakes area during the seventeenth century reported that villagers there tortured war captives by scalping them and then heaping hot coals onto their scalped heads. But this was just part of several extensive torture “complexes” that anthropologist Nathaniel Knowles described among eastern Native Americans (torture was not as common on the plains and in the west), differentiated by how the victim was secured for abuse—on a frame, a platform, a pole, or a stake.26 Methods were fiendishly inventive and included: hanging red-hot metal hatchets around the neck; tearing out beards; slitting ears, noses, eyes, and tongues; pulling sinews out of arms; skinning alive; outright burning; burning cords bound around the body; and pincushioning with burning pine splinters. Knowles reported that one Seneca chief had been tortured by the Cherokee by having the soles of his feet burned, hard corn pushed into the blisters, and then being forced to run a gauntlet of warriors attempting to club him to death. Other captives had multiple cuts sliced into their bodies and embers pushed inside the wounds, or were slowly dismembered and disemboweled.

  Given such bloodcurdling treatment, defeated Native American warriors might have been forgiven for blubbering all the way to their gory ends. The evidence is, however, that they met them defiantly. The European explorer, trader, and historian James Adair, to give one example, described the firebrand torture of an Iroquois man that he witnessed, saying that the man:

  …having unconcernedly suffered much sharp torture…told them with scorn they did not know how to punish a noted enemy, therefore he was willing to teach them…Accordingly he requested of them a pipe and some tobacco, which was given him: as soon as he lighted it, he sat down, naked as he was, on the women’s burning torches that were within his circle and continued smoking his pipe without the least discomposure.27

  Similarly, in cases of Iroquois platform torture, which often lasted for days, missionaries reported that victims were expected to, and did, sing and dance the entire time. These “death songs” might be simple, lyrical farewells to the world the victim was shortly to leave, such as the haunting Choctaw song recorded by the poet Jim Barnes (himself part-Choctaw): “When I pass, this prairie will hold my tracks as long as the wind sleeps.”28 More commonly, however, they combined boastful accounts of the war deeds of the victim himself, scornful assertions of his lack of fear, and threats to his torturing enemies of the vengeance his tribe was shortly to wreak. This last—the intense sense of corporate, tribal identity—is probably the key to the incredible endurance of these tortured Native American warriors. Modern SERE instructors, too, emphasize in-group bonds and a sense of shared ordeal as essential for their graduates to withstand enemy abuse.

  Whether those same graduates could endure the attentions of an Iroquois platform torturer is, fortunately, a question rarely asked.

  Strong corporate identity also helped another group of victims withstand extreme torture—the Roman Christian martyrs (though here religious consolation probably played an even greater role). These were those early adherents of Jesus who, in the four centuries after his death, faced harsh persecution from the Roman Empire. The empire’s torture methods were uniquely brutal. Roman scourging, for example, used bone-and metal-fretted whips like the horribile flagellum (“horrible whip”), which tore off so much flesh its victims often died of blood loss. Criminals and unrepentant Christians might also be sentenced to wear the tunica molesta (“annoying shirt”)—a serious misnomer given the tunica was a naphtha-soaked garment that was set aflame once donned. Similarly, most people are aware of damnatio ad bestias—the practice of throwing Christians to the beasts—but not of what it actually entailed. In addition to being fed to lions, victims of damnatio ad bestias might also be tied to wild boars and gored, staked out in front of an enraged bear, or netted and thrown to a leopard. Women were treated particularly cruelly: as well as being gored by wild bulls they were, according to one writer, also sometimes smeared with the vaginal fluid of cows so as to be raped by them.29 If written accounts are to be believed, however, the early Christians frequently refused to buckle under such torture. The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, the scrupulously reliable fourth-century church historian, lists examples such as that of the youth Apphianus, who was racked for twenty-four hours, scourged so hard the bones of his ribs and spine showed, and then had his feet soaked in oil and burned to stumps; he still refused to renounce his faith and was drowned in the sea. Another man, Sanctus, had the book of Roman tortures thrown at him, being subjected to such heavy scourging, racking, damnatio ad bestias, and burning from hot brass plates fastened to his body (and
particularly, his genitals) that he became “one continued wound, mangled and shrivelled, that had entirely lost the form of a man to the external eye” he, too, held firm, being finally roasted to death on an iron chair.

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  Raging bulls

  Screen boxer Rocky Balboa beat all his opponents with his heart, not his muscle, according to his wife, Adrian. But ancient Tahitian boxers needed the hearts of lions just to get in the ring, so deadly was their version of the sport. The reports of missionary and author William Ellis leave no doubt about how brutal the Tahitian ring could be:

  …no time was spent in sparring or parrying the blows…[which] were generally straightforward, severe, and heavy; usually aimed at the head. They fought with the naked fist, and the whole skin of the forehead has been at times torn or driven off at a blow…

  Predictably, the injury and death toll from such savage pugilism was substantial. Ellis recorded that Tahitian boxing champions “were proud to boast of the number of men they had maimed and killed.”30